Ramblings about knitting, life, exploits, and other things.

February 15, 2007

Midwest Snow Storm Fails to Engender Massive Knitting Progress

I had this really nifty post that I wrote this afternoon.
But ... then I had this really annoying connection failure with Type Pad.
It went bye bye.
So, I'm trying again.
And to break the jinx, I'm adding a bit of silly quizzness, just for fun.

Which famous feline are you?

You're Hobbes. First of all, the makers of this quiz would like to congratulate you. You have our seal of approval. You are kind, intelligent, loving, and good-humoredly practical. You're proud of who you are. At the same time, you're tolerant of those who lack your clearsightedness. You're always playful, but never annoying. For these traits, you are well-loved, and with good cause.Take this quiz!

And that's what they say about that.
I'm not always as tolerant of others as Hobbes would indicate, but I'll try. I like being Hobbes. Hobbes is smart. Hobbes can have fun anywhere..Even in snow-- Hobbes enjoys the snow.I enjoy it in a much more theoretical way than Hobbes does.

When it comes to the reality, I find it... less fun.Perhaps its because it caused me to spend not two days (the standard) of lots of together-time with my darling daughters... not three days (which we expected this past weekend)... not even four... but FIVE days during which I was not out of earshot of one or both of my children for more than about twenty minutes.

I mean, I do love my kids. Really I do... but I'm used to having some mental time away from them. I actually miss work.

(shudder -- who am I?)

Not that this week hasn't yielded some progress on the great Quest to Replace the Dying Caravan. I mean, I DID drag J around to car dealerships on Monday (when she had one of those random days off school). We drove the Hyundai minivan ... which I liked until I tested what would happen if I had to stop suddenly while driving 45 miles an hour.

You can't stop suddenly in a Hyundai minivan. Visions of those deer bounding signs leap to mind.

Just in case that was a fluke, I drove the Kia ... Hyundai's twin. Guess what. No fluke. You can't stop suddenly in that one either.

Rats. They could theoretically have saved me upwards of $10,000.00 if I have to get a new new car (instead of finding a nice 1 to 2 year old one).

So we tried the Toyota. Nice in many respects. Good brakes too. Deranged placement of the gear shift.And bad cup holders.Bad cup holders, however, seems to be the theme. Everyone's got 'em.

Then we went over to Honda where we found this:

OMG! It's the Pregnant Rollerskate! I remember this car! I rode in this car! Dixon! it's your car!!!

Ahem. Once we got over the first generation Civic on the wall, we visited the Honda Odyssey, and took it for a spin in the gloaming. Similar deranged gearshift placement. A lot like the Toyota, but with some minor differences that I liked.

I have one minivan thing left to drive: The Nissan Quest.

I would have gotten that done sometime in the past couple of days but... well...there was this snow...Lots of snow.With lots of drifts... Note the bridge here... it goes OVER my pond...Note how the snow on one side comes up to the rail...yeah.snow.So on Tuesday, we didn't go anywhere.I shoveled out the drive way. It was up to my knees... but I dug out a path wide enough for a car to escape through. That was at about 11:00. I guess I thought someone would be around eventually to plow the street.By 1:00 you couldn't tell I'd ever walked on the driveway, much less dug out a path.No plows..So Wednesday... surely we can get out Wednesday...we shoveled again. Only this time, we got to go through a serious drift that had formed in the center of our driveway. At least three feet deep.But of course, when we were done....The street still looked like this:

Note the tire tracks? One of our neighbors has a big-ass four-wheel drive thing. It got out.We did not.I did get to ponder the weirdness of wind. Some places were drifted deeply, others you could still see the grass!Of course the wind never does that in areas that we want to walk or drive through. Those get drifts... or at least fully stacked snow.

You'd think with all this snowage... and the resulting me trapped in my house, I'd be posting FO shots of things like, well... Icarus.

You'd think.

But ya see, Monday night when I was knitting the row before the penultimate row, I wasn't focusing as well as I might have been. So I missed a few yo4's. More than a few. About 8 I'd guess. In the first third of the row too.So, Tuesday afternoon, when I was knitting along merrily on the penultimate row, I discovered the error. Now, I know that you can sneak in a missed yo here and there.but a yo4? that's harder.And 8 of them>not so much.So last night, I tinked and dripped beads back out, and tinked...

Tonight I reknit that row. I double checked those yo4's repeatedly. I'm fairly confident they're all there. I started on the penultimate row, but decided to leave it for the waiting room tomorrow morning.Assuming, of course, that I actually do escape my house to morrow.

I mean, the plow DID come late this afternoon. But the winds could pick back up and ... well..Not counting any chickens, or rows, or anything with this many hours for the wind gods to undo them.

Ok, so that is *almost* my car, I had the next model year, which was slightly more pregnant. And speaking of pregnant, we certainly did more than just RIDE in that car. At least I think I remember that ...

Funny enough you remember that car at all. Ahhhh...those were the days. By the way, the poor thing came to an ignominious end on the Pennsyvania Turnpike, throwing a rod in a terrible snowstorm. But *that* is another story.